Toward the end of the school year, I was perusing Pinterest and came across a blog post called "Where have you been all my life Structure Strips!?" This caught my eye because the structure strip on the left hand side of the page contained a main idea, some key words and key concepts. Although this was to guide student writing for history, I immediately saw an application for note-taking in my Honors Biology class.
One of the skills I want my students to develop in this class is the ability to read a text and take notes. This skill becomes more and more valuable as students move on academically. Up to this point, I was asking my students to do modified Cornell notes as they read selections from their textbook based on a main idea I gave them to put at the top of their page of notes. Afterward, I would give them a list of disciplinary core ideas (DCIs) from NGSS or enduring understandings (EUs) from NYSSLS and they had to pick which page of notes those statements would go with. As the year went on, several students began getting the hang of outlining the most important information, but many students were just making a list of bold words and writing the definitions. They needed more guidance.
For the last unit of the year, Ecology, I gave them my own structure strips to guide their note-taking. After cutting each page into the four strips and gluing each of them into four different pages of their notebooks, I told students to use the main idea, key vocabulary, and included DCIs or EUs to help them decide what from the reading should actually go in their notes. This way, they were not guessing about what was the most important information in the section they were reading in their textbook.
As we approached the end of the unit, I asked one of my students (who had been doing fairly well with the Cornell style) what she thought of the structure strips. She answered that she like them better than the Cornell notes because she felt like using the structure strips gave her more freedom in how she took her notes. Overall, I felt students notes were getting closer to the key ideas in the text that they needed to be focusing on. I forgot to take a picture of any of my students notes though, so I don't have any student examples. Oops!
Here are links to each set of structure strips for the seven units we do in Honors Biology:
(The numbers under the main idea are the chapter and sections from their textbook, Pearson's Concepts and Connections, that their notes should cover. Unit 7 may be missing those.)
Unit 1: Characteristics of Life
Unit 2: Nutrients, Energy, and Biochemical Processes
Unit 3: Homeostasis in Humans
Unit 4: Diseases and Disruption of Homeostasis
Unit 5: Comparative Reproduction
Unit 6: Genetics, Biotech, and Decision Making
Unit 7: Ecology
